Gmail still lacks these important features

Google has rolled out some major changes for Gmail, but it’s still missing these features.

Gmail has a new look and new tools today, courtesy of a redesign that Google (GOOG,GOOGL) pushed out two weeks before its big I/O developer conference.

The update to Gmail — available in a browser if you click the gear icon at the top right and select “Try the new Gmail”— adds such thoughtful features as “nudges” that remind you not to flake out on frequent correspondents and the ability to “snooze” an email, so it will pop back to the top of your inbox after a set period of time.

Unfortunately, the redesign is missing fixes to some longstanding issues with Google’s widely-used mail service.

End-to-end encryption

Much coverage of the new Gmail has focused on its new Confidential Mode, a feature that lets you send a restricted-access message. You can set it to erase automatically after a set period, you can lock it with a one-time passcode, and you can prohibit the recipient from forwarding, downloading, printing or copying its text.

(If you don’t use Gmail and get a Confidential Mode message, you’ll have to read it on the Web. Or so Google tells me — the feature isn’t active in my account yet.)

But Confidential Mode doesn’t secure a message against eavesdropping at each end of the conversation — even when stored in your Sent mailbox.

Insert links in mobile

Google as a search engine would not exist without being able to rank pages based on how many other pages link back to them. But the company’s Android and iOS Gmail apps place so little value on hyperlinks, they don’t even let you turn a few words into one the way you can in Gmail’s web app or any desktop mail app.

But while the new Gmail grasps the idea of a message being worth your attention at some set time in the future, it still has no idea that some messages can have an expiration date.

Industry-standard contacts import and export

Google has been saying and doing the right things about data portabilityfor almost a decade now. In general, if you want to take your data out of a Google app or site, you can — and Google lets you do so in a standard format that you should be able to upload to a competitor.

But the new version of Gmail, like the old, still makes you jump through extra hoops toexport your contacts in the“vCard” format most likely to be supported cleanly by any other contacts app.

Selecting a vCard export option fromGoogle’s Contacts web app (click or tap the tiny person icon at the bottom left of Gmail’s page) still yields an instruction to revert to “the old Google Contacts”—as in, the oneGoogle replaced in 2015. You’ll also have to do this to import a vCard from another app, such as Apple’s Contacts.

How is a bugthis lame still unfixed in 2018? Maybe the product manager involved was using a beta version of the new Gmail and snoozed the message imposing a deadline until sometime in 2020.